Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "fiction"
Forster's Aspects of the Novel
Forster’s Aspects of the Novel is being used in this country by most teachers of creative writing/fiction. While this is a book that has some interesting points, the biggest problem with it, or rather with using it in a class, is that its definition of a good work of fiction only applies to a certain kind of fiction: 19th century realist literature, in particular Anglo-Saxon literature. To define fiction in light of this very limited time and space, by using this one frame as some kind of universal frame, means to think that 19th century American/British literature is universal. It reveals that literature is not thought of as a concept that has changed over time. How can one write literature if one cannot even understand that the way we write is time-and-space specific—not in the sense that we have “different cultural values” (as the cliché would have it) according to the time and space we inhabit, but in the sense that the way we create always follows our understanding of time and space?
Forster’s interpretation of the tale of Scheherazade (in Aspects of the Novel) is the perfect example not only of Anglo-Saxon cause-effect logic but of a cultural appropriation of a tale conceived according to a different structure of thinking. Scheherazade avoided her fate, says Forster, because she has in her power the weapon of suspense; the king spares her life because he wants to find out what happened next. This is one way of looking at things. But one may actually say that the essence of the story of Scheherazade resides not in the “suspense” (i.e., the plot) but in a perpetually postponed climax. A story is here only the beginning to another story, which is itself a part in an endless chain of stories—a Borgesian labyrinthlike view rather than a linear structure underlying the logic of “next.” To think of this story in terms of “suspense” means to imagine a “resolution” of the “plot,” when in fact Scheherazade’s story is anti-climatic. Pleasure comes here from the constant postponement, not from the gradual movement toward an orgasmic ending, as in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. If Scheherazade’s story had been written by an Anglo-Saxon, it would have surely ended with a killing—either of Scheherazade or of the king. It is amazing that Forster can read the following sentence—which he considers the backbone of A Thousand and One Nights—as an example of his theory of suspense and of the universal power of “what’s next:” “At this moment [when the sun rose:] Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, and discreet, was silent.” For me, this sentence is clearly built on the opposition between night and day; like in old creation myths—Orpheus and Eurydice, to name only one—the power of storytelling is directly linked here to darkness. The sentence tells us quite literally that the light of day kills the story. The power of telling comes from the mysterious dark of the night and not from rational daylight.
Forster’s interpretation of the tale of Scheherazade (in Aspects of the Novel) is the perfect example not only of Anglo-Saxon cause-effect logic but of a cultural appropriation of a tale conceived according to a different structure of thinking. Scheherazade avoided her fate, says Forster, because she has in her power the weapon of suspense; the king spares her life because he wants to find out what happened next. This is one way of looking at things. But one may actually say that the essence of the story of Scheherazade resides not in the “suspense” (i.e., the plot) but in a perpetually postponed climax. A story is here only the beginning to another story, which is itself a part in an endless chain of stories—a Borgesian labyrinthlike view rather than a linear structure underlying the logic of “next.” To think of this story in terms of “suspense” means to imagine a “resolution” of the “plot,” when in fact Scheherazade’s story is anti-climatic. Pleasure comes here from the constant postponement, not from the gradual movement toward an orgasmic ending, as in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. If Scheherazade’s story had been written by an Anglo-Saxon, it would have surely ended with a killing—either of Scheherazade or of the king. It is amazing that Forster can read the following sentence—which he considers the backbone of A Thousand and One Nights—as an example of his theory of suspense and of the universal power of “what’s next:” “At this moment [when the sun rose:] Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, and discreet, was silent.” For me, this sentence is clearly built on the opposition between night and day; like in old creation myths—Orpheus and Eurydice, to name only one—the power of storytelling is directly linked here to darkness. The sentence tells us quite literally that the light of day kills the story. The power of telling comes from the mysterious dark of the night and not from rational daylight.

Duo Duo's Snow Plain
Duo Duo (b. 1951), one of the most important contemporary Chinese poets, is from a generation that witnessed the persecution of its parents—intellectuals qualified as “degenerate bourgeois” by the communists—and came of age during Mao’s so-called “Cultural Revolution,” when these intellectuals and bourgeois were exiled to the countryside to do manual labor. After the crush of Tiananmen Square in 1989 Duo Duo lived in Europe for fifteen years, and then returned to China. These two very different experiences are, obviously, present in his writings. A newly released translation from Zephyr Press (trans. by John Crespi), Snow Plain, includes translations of six short stories written in the 1980s and 90s, some set in China, some in Britain and Canada. The stories set in China are far better, as they exude a certain strangeness the other stories don’t have. “Sumo” and “The Day I Got to Xi’An” are among the strangest stories I’ve ever read. It’s hard to find an equivalent in Western literature, as their strangeness is different than, say, Kafka’s. “Sumo” is vaguely reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet’s “Last Year in Marienbad”—except much better. The only writer with a comparable style is another contemporary Chinese author, Gao Xingjian (winner of the Nobel Prize).

Published on February 17, 2011 22:20
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Tags:
chinese, communism, exile, fiction, short-stories
nahoonkara by Peter Grandbois
If I tried to summarize nahoonkara, I’d probably come up with something like this: a story told in the voices of several members of the Gerrull family, moving back and forth between mid-nineteenth-century Wisconsin and a mining town in late nineteenth-century Colorado. It would be a summary that wouldn’t necessarily inspire me to pick up this novel and read it, which goes to show that summaries don’t tell you anything about a book.
Even more than the (his)story of a family in a particular space and time, this novel depicts the chemistry and alchemy of a community. Surprisingly, the warmth with which it accomplishes this is not incompatible with the dreamlike universe of snow that emerges toward the end of the novel. In the town of Seven Falls snow falls for three months in a row and people start building tunnels in order to survive and move from place to place, thus creating an alternative, underground world where all the laws from the world above are abolished. This universe of snow that ends up covering the entire town is identical to the one Killian (the novel’s main voice) has seen, much earlier in the novel, in a trance induced by a mesmerist.
The novel has the flow of a rhapsody in which people and natural elements are equal characters. It requires the attention one needs to read poetry and it has the same entrancing power.
“All through the night, I held her close, hoping the pressure would solidify her, that the friction would smooth the rough edges, reshape the pieces that had not been abraded, but I was new to the ways of love, and I did not know that just because one soul wills something that intention cannot always cross the vast gulf to another.”
Even more than the (his)story of a family in a particular space and time, this novel depicts the chemistry and alchemy of a community. Surprisingly, the warmth with which it accomplishes this is not incompatible with the dreamlike universe of snow that emerges toward the end of the novel. In the town of Seven Falls snow falls for three months in a row and people start building tunnels in order to survive and move from place to place, thus creating an alternative, underground world where all the laws from the world above are abolished. This universe of snow that ends up covering the entire town is identical to the one Killian (the novel’s main voice) has seen, much earlier in the novel, in a trance induced by a mesmerist.
The novel has the flow of a rhapsody in which people and natural elements are equal characters. It requires the attention one needs to read poetry and it has the same entrancing power.
“All through the night, I held her close, hoping the pressure would solidify her, that the friction would smooth the rough edges, reshape the pieces that had not been abraded, but I was new to the ways of love, and I did not know that just because one soul wills something that intention cannot always cross the vast gulf to another.”

Published on March 03, 2011 21:46
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Tags:
contemporary-american, fiction, novel
The French-American Foundation Translation Prizes
In an effort to increase their cultural visibility in the States, The French have been sponsoring for a number of years various translation prizes, and helped the winning translators find publishers. This year the reception celebrating the finalists and the winners was on Tuesday, May 24th, and since I was in the City for the BEA, I was more than happy to honor the invitation I’d received. David Bellos—celebrated translator of Ismail Kadare and Georges Pérec—was Master of Ceremonies.
There were two fiction and two non-fiction prizes: in the former category, the winners were Mitzi Angel for Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella 03, and Lydia Davis for Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; in the latter category, Frederick Brown for Tocqueville’s Letters from America, and Jane Marie Todd for Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon. Surprisingly, Mitzi Angel is not a professional translator; in fact, she has never translated before, but the book had a strong supporter in a Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor. Lydia Davis wasn’t there, so John Siciliano from Penguin accepted the prize on her behalf. I had met John before, when he was working with my other half, poet and translator Stephen Kessler, on the editing and translation of Borges’s Complete Sonnets. He is a charming, intelligent young man, and it gives me some hope to see that there are still people in his generation—he is barely thirty—who are so devoted to books and serious literature. Jane Marie Todd--whom I didn't know before--gave a great speech. She started with a list of all the things she doesn’t have as a translator: no regular paycheck, no library and interloan privileges, no promotion, no sabbatical, no title; and yet, she said, whenever she thinks of all the things she had to put up with while working in academia, she considers herself fortunate. Now she works at home in her pajamas, reads and translates whatever it pleases her and satisfies her intellectual curiosity, and she doesn’t need to specialize. I am not a hugger, but I felt like hugging her.
After this intellectual feast, we were offered wine and (some very good) champagne. Not to mention the delicious appetizers: they were international in origin (Chinese rolls, crab fried puffs, salmon sandwiches, Mediterranean feta pastries) but the chef must have been French. A fabulous reception!
There were two fiction and two non-fiction prizes: in the former category, the winners were Mitzi Angel for Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella 03, and Lydia Davis for Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; in the latter category, Frederick Brown for Tocqueville’s Letters from America, and Jane Marie Todd for Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon. Surprisingly, Mitzi Angel is not a professional translator; in fact, she has never translated before, but the book had a strong supporter in a Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor. Lydia Davis wasn’t there, so John Siciliano from Penguin accepted the prize on her behalf. I had met John before, when he was working with my other half, poet and translator Stephen Kessler, on the editing and translation of Borges’s Complete Sonnets. He is a charming, intelligent young man, and it gives me some hope to see that there are still people in his generation—he is barely thirty—who are so devoted to books and serious literature. Jane Marie Todd--whom I didn't know before--gave a great speech. She started with a list of all the things she doesn’t have as a translator: no regular paycheck, no library and interloan privileges, no promotion, no sabbatical, no title; and yet, she said, whenever she thinks of all the things she had to put up with while working in academia, she considers herself fortunate. Now she works at home in her pajamas, reads and translates whatever it pleases her and satisfies her intellectual curiosity, and she doesn’t need to specialize. I am not a hugger, but I felt like hugging her.
After this intellectual feast, we were offered wine and (some very good) champagne. Not to mention the delicious appetizers: they were international in origin (Chinese rolls, crab fried puffs, salmon sandwiches, Mediterranean feta pastries) but the chef must have been French. A fabulous reception!


Published on May 25, 2011 07:25
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Tags:
fiction, french, french-american, non-fiction, translation
Book Expo America 2011: Third Day, Wednesday, May 25th
It turned out that, indeed, there was another area of the exhibit that had more publishers of literary fiction than the area I’d previously visited. By the end of the day I had a bag full of so many goodies I had to ship them home. First, I stopped (again) by Europa Editions’s table because I’d been told that they would give books away. I had the unexpected luck of meeting the publisher himself, Kent Caroll, who let me choose two novels. I picked The Worst Intentions by Alessandro Piperno and The Art of Losing by Rebecca Connell.
Then, I found Other Press, another publisher I like not only because of the authors they publish but also because they respect and promote their authors. I know a very good writer, Michelle Hoover, who had a great experience with them, and whose novel, The Quickening, I highly recommend. The people there were all friendly and let me pick whatever I wanted among their advanced reading copies. I took Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, and the intriguing Calling Mr. King by Ronald de Feo, both forthcoming in September. And, finally, I made a discovery: Biblioasis, an independent publisher from Canada. They have just published The Accident by Mihail Sebastian, a very interesting Romanian writer from the first half of the 20th century.
With my bag full I headed for the autographing table of Carmela Ciuraru, author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. As on Tuesday, the autographing area (which included about thirty tables) was swarming with dozens of passionate readers who were patiently waiting in line to get a signature from an author. I asked an organizer where I could buy the book and...I found out that the books were FREE. Well, that explained the passion of all those readers.The QuickeningNom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms
Then, I found Other Press, another publisher I like not only because of the authors they publish but also because they respect and promote their authors. I know a very good writer, Michelle Hoover, who had a great experience with them, and whose novel, The Quickening, I highly recommend. The people there were all friendly and let me pick whatever I wanted among their advanced reading copies. I took Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, and the intriguing Calling Mr. King by Ronald de Feo, both forthcoming in September. And, finally, I made a discovery: Biblioasis, an independent publisher from Canada. They have just published The Accident by Mihail Sebastian, a very interesting Romanian writer from the first half of the 20th century.
With my bag full I headed for the autographing table of Carmela Ciuraru, author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. As on Tuesday, the autographing area (which included about thirty tables) was swarming with dozens of passionate readers who were patiently waiting in line to get a signature from an author. I asked an organizer where I could buy the book and...I found out that the books were FREE. Well, that explained the passion of all those readers.The QuickeningNom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms
Published on May 25, 2011 23:25
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Tags:
biblioasis, europa-editions, fiction, italian, other-press, pen-names, romanian
My Top Ten Fiction Books for 2011
1. Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage (2011) [Hungarian]
2. Alessandro Piperno, The Worst Intentions [Italian]
3. Dezsö Kosztolányi, Kornel Esti (2011) [Hungarian]
4. Steven Millhausaer, The Barnum Museum [American]
5. Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (2011) [Russian-German]
6. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio [American]
7. Brian Evenson, The Wavering Knife [American]
8. Olga Grushin, The Line & The Dream Life of Sukhanov [Russian-American]
9. Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl [Chinese-American]
10. Thomas Bernhard, Extinction [Austrian]
2. Alessandro Piperno, The Worst Intentions [Italian]
3. Dezsö Kosztolányi, Kornel Esti (2011) [Hungarian]
4. Steven Millhausaer, The Barnum Museum [American]
5. Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (2011) [Russian-German]
6. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio [American]
7. Brian Evenson, The Wavering Knife [American]
8. Olga Grushin, The Line & The Dream Life of Sukhanov [Russian-American]
9. Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl [Chinese-American]
10. Thomas Bernhard, Extinction [Austrian]











Mihail Sebastian, The Accident (Biblioasis, 2011. Trans. from the Romanian by Stephen Henighan)
Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was one of the interwar European writers who were deeply influenced by Marcel Proust, in particular by the jealous ruminations of his protagonists, and the idea that we can never know the truth about another person, which was expressed by portraying a given character through various points of view that created a fluid and elusive “truth.”
The Accident has as a backdrop Bucharest’s (Romania’s capital) cosmopolitan life in the 1930s, when artists, lawyers, businessmen and bohemians rub elbows in bars until two am, go to the same receptions and parties, and spend their winter vacation at Predeal and other ski resorts in the area.
The main character, a dejected, melancholy young lawyer, suffering of some kind of mal de vivre, is trying to heal from a painful relationship. Like Proust’s objects of desire, the woman he is obsessed with is a mysterious puzzle made of many sides shown to the reader alternately, without nonetheless revealing her “secret.” The protagonist is offered a chance to free himself when he meets literally by accident (that is, as the result of an accident) another woman who will teach him how to ski.
The novel’s best pages are the descriptions of the mountains in winter, and the exhilarating sensation one experiences while skiing. A captivating novel and a good translation.
The Accident has as a backdrop Bucharest’s (Romania’s capital) cosmopolitan life in the 1930s, when artists, lawyers, businessmen and bohemians rub elbows in bars until two am, go to the same receptions and parties, and spend their winter vacation at Predeal and other ski resorts in the area.
The main character, a dejected, melancholy young lawyer, suffering of some kind of mal de vivre, is trying to heal from a painful relationship. Like Proust’s objects of desire, the woman he is obsessed with is a mysterious puzzle made of many sides shown to the reader alternately, without nonetheless revealing her “secret.” The protagonist is offered a chance to free himself when he meets literally by accident (that is, as the result of an accident) another woman who will teach him how to ski.
The novel’s best pages are the descriptions of the mountains in winter, and the exhilarating sensation one experiences while skiing. A captivating novel and a good translation.

Published on December 22, 2011 19:03
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Tags:
fiction, proust, romanian-literature, twentieth-century-novels
The Golovlyovs by M. Saltykov-Shchedrin
A 19th century masterpiece about a Russian family of landowners. The psyshological drama and the descriptions of everyday life in the Russian countryside are among the strongest I've ever come across. The characters are built in the tradition of great archetypes, in particular that of the Miser (see Molière and Dickens). It's one of those books that you can't put down, and which are entirely satisfying on an intellectual and emotional level. The ending is pure Dostoevsky: it has an unexpected catharsis, in which the "bad" (not to say "evil") characters attain a brief, saint-like illumination through a symbolic, rather than plausible, repentance. On top of this, the edition I have has gorgeous ink drawings by a certain Kukrynisky (one name). The Russian publisher (yes, the book was published in Russia in a beautiful English translation) is asking the book's readers to write them with their opinions on the novel, the book's design and the translation. I wish I could do this, but I doubt they still exist or have the same address 36 years later. (The book cover I am attaching here is not of the edition I read.)

Published on January 22, 2012 13:08
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Tags:
19th-century-literature, fiction, novels, russia
Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy
Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy (NYRB, trans. from the Hungarian by John Bátki, introduction by John Lukacs)
Krúdy has been hailed by his fellow Hungarians as not only one of the greatest Hungarian writers, but maybe the greatest. He has been compared to Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz because, like them, he is unclassifiable, and his greatness has been described by Sándor Márai as “almost past comprehension.” Given all the above, the reader may be slightly disappointed by his novel, Sunflower (written in 1918 and published for the first time in English in 1997). Lukacs’s introduction warns us about the difficulties to translate Krúdy’s poetic prose not only because of his style, but also because of the hidden allusions (cultural, historical) that only a Hungarian can understand. With an ambiguous formulation, he tells the reader that the translator “has tried” and “largely succeeded.”
As I read the book, I tried to find in my mind literary equivalents for it, and the only one I came up with was Craii de Curtea Veche by the Romanian writer Mateiu Caragiale, a novel written around the same time and hailed by Romanian writers as an unequaled masterpiece. What these books have in common, aside from a poetic, archaic style, is an atmosphere of fin-de-siècle, of a gone world that the narrators are trying to bring back through the power of words. The world they describe and which triggers their nostalgia is one in which men drink their fill and reminisce about past lovers—in other words, a world that is itself prone to nostalgic remembrance. In this world, the inn is the emblematic space of dramatic encounters, a microcosm from which stories about other worlds unspool, where an old woman spotted at a nearby table triggers a long story about a bygone beauty and the drama that had once surrounded her. This nostalgia about nostalgia creates a dreamlike universe, but this universe is far from being depicted as some kind of idyllic space; on the contrary, there is a crudeness and even an ugliness to the people in it. The apparent contradiction between this nostalgia and the world that is its object makes me think that these two authors may be impossible to translate for an American audience.
And this brings me to the issue of translation, and to whether translating a book from a very different culture and historical time is possible. In this case, I think the answer is no, not because translating the author’s words might be impossible. What is impossible to translate is what the author hasn’t said, and which is, nevertheless, present in the book: a sensibility circumscribed to a certain culture and historical time. The idea of a bygone world and the accompanying nostalgia may be to some degree universal (in American literature, Gone with the Wind is a great example), but what differentiates an American and a Hungarian is that loss gives the latter a perverse pleasure. Compare the spirit of Scarlet O’Hara who, undeterred by all she’s lost, declares courageously, “Tomorrow is another day,” hopeful that she can start all over again, to Krúdy’s characters who will do tomorrow what they are doing today: reminisce about yesterday.
Add to the above the fact that, unlike most novels, Krudy’s novel has several centers from which radiate several stories. For the first half, a woman, Eveline, seems to be the main protagonist, but then, the focus shifts to her neighbor, Pistoli, who becomes the main character. Pistoli is the incarnation of the “old Hungary” whose loss the narrator (and the author) deplores, and with whom most American readers, especially women, would find it hard to identify: an ugly yet impressive man, presumably in his sixties, who venerates the bottle, takes himself for a philosopher (and doesn’t spare the reader his numerous “witticisms”), thinks with nostalgia about the dozens of mistresses from his past, and sometimes visits his former wives, now locked up (by him) in mental institutions. On the other hand, the mating dance of cruelty between Pistoli and Miss Maszkeradi, a wild woman and feminist avant la lettre, is fascinating, as is the relationship between her friend, the suave Eveline and her suitor, Andor Almos-Dreamer (who is, indeed, a dreamer). The novel doesn’t have a plot per se, but a series of events, which don’t really develop toward a climax; rather, they go up and down, and right and left until Pistoli’s death restores a lost equilibrium and brings some hope for the future of Eveline and Almos-Dreamer.
Krúdy has been hailed by his fellow Hungarians as not only one of the greatest Hungarian writers, but maybe the greatest. He has been compared to Robert Walser and Bruno Schulz because, like them, he is unclassifiable, and his greatness has been described by Sándor Márai as “almost past comprehension.” Given all the above, the reader may be slightly disappointed by his novel, Sunflower (written in 1918 and published for the first time in English in 1997). Lukacs’s introduction warns us about the difficulties to translate Krúdy’s poetic prose not only because of his style, but also because of the hidden allusions (cultural, historical) that only a Hungarian can understand. With an ambiguous formulation, he tells the reader that the translator “has tried” and “largely succeeded.”
As I read the book, I tried to find in my mind literary equivalents for it, and the only one I came up with was Craii de Curtea Veche by the Romanian writer Mateiu Caragiale, a novel written around the same time and hailed by Romanian writers as an unequaled masterpiece. What these books have in common, aside from a poetic, archaic style, is an atmosphere of fin-de-siècle, of a gone world that the narrators are trying to bring back through the power of words. The world they describe and which triggers their nostalgia is one in which men drink their fill and reminisce about past lovers—in other words, a world that is itself prone to nostalgic remembrance. In this world, the inn is the emblematic space of dramatic encounters, a microcosm from which stories about other worlds unspool, where an old woman spotted at a nearby table triggers a long story about a bygone beauty and the drama that had once surrounded her. This nostalgia about nostalgia creates a dreamlike universe, but this universe is far from being depicted as some kind of idyllic space; on the contrary, there is a crudeness and even an ugliness to the people in it. The apparent contradiction between this nostalgia and the world that is its object makes me think that these two authors may be impossible to translate for an American audience.
And this brings me to the issue of translation, and to whether translating a book from a very different culture and historical time is possible. In this case, I think the answer is no, not because translating the author’s words might be impossible. What is impossible to translate is what the author hasn’t said, and which is, nevertheless, present in the book: a sensibility circumscribed to a certain culture and historical time. The idea of a bygone world and the accompanying nostalgia may be to some degree universal (in American literature, Gone with the Wind is a great example), but what differentiates an American and a Hungarian is that loss gives the latter a perverse pleasure. Compare the spirit of Scarlet O’Hara who, undeterred by all she’s lost, declares courageously, “Tomorrow is another day,” hopeful that she can start all over again, to Krúdy’s characters who will do tomorrow what they are doing today: reminisce about yesterday.
Add to the above the fact that, unlike most novels, Krudy’s novel has several centers from which radiate several stories. For the first half, a woman, Eveline, seems to be the main protagonist, but then, the focus shifts to her neighbor, Pistoli, who becomes the main character. Pistoli is the incarnation of the “old Hungary” whose loss the narrator (and the author) deplores, and with whom most American readers, especially women, would find it hard to identify: an ugly yet impressive man, presumably in his sixties, who venerates the bottle, takes himself for a philosopher (and doesn’t spare the reader his numerous “witticisms”), thinks with nostalgia about the dozens of mistresses from his past, and sometimes visits his former wives, now locked up (by him) in mental institutions. On the other hand, the mating dance of cruelty between Pistoli and Miss Maszkeradi, a wild woman and feminist avant la lettre, is fascinating, as is the relationship between her friend, the suave Eveline and her suitor, Andor Almos-Dreamer (who is, indeed, a dreamer). The novel doesn’t have a plot per se, but a series of events, which don’t really develop toward a climax; rather, they go up and down, and right and left until Pistoli’s death restores a lost equilibrium and brings some hope for the future of Eveline and Almos-Dreamer.

Published on May 02, 2012 10:57
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Tags:
20th-century-literature, fiction, hungarian, novels
War and War by László Krasznahorkai
War and War by László Krasznahorkai (Trans. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. New Directions, 2006)
László Krasznahorkai is not an easy author. I am saying this as a lover of Proust (with whom LK has in common those long, twisted sentences) and of Sebald (with whom he shares a gloomy mood and the ability to write fiction by creating a reality-effect via, for example, photos of real objects; incidentally, Sebald was one of the first writers to recognize LK’s genius). But what Krasznahorkai doesn’t have in common with Proust is the latter’s “soft” side, his ruminations on the human heart, and his repetitive love triangles in which are rooted most of the dramatic conflicts in In Search of Lost Time. In fact, in LK’s world there are few women, which may be one of the reasons I find him not always very pleasant to read. But when he does portray women, the portraits are compelling, and perhaps not accidentally one of the most engaging—for me, at least—parts in War and War is the part in which the protagonist falls under the spell of a gorgeous stewardess.
I always believed that to present a novel trough its plot means not only to impoverish it, but to misrepresent it, and this is all the more true for War and War. But, for those interested, here is an attempt: Korin, who works in a records office in Budapest, and who has a PhD in history, finds a manuscript that is so beautifully written and strangely unintelligible that he decides to abandon his entire life, burn all his personal documents, save for his passport, and leave for “the center of the world,” New York. Initially, it is not clear what the relationship between this extraordinary document whose events take place several centuries ago in Italy, and contemporary New York is, and why Korin chooses New York as the location from where he launches the document into eternity via the Internet (when he could do that from anywhere in the world) and where he eventually commits suicide, but, toward the end it appears that the relationship is symbolic, New York being the center of a world system whose beginnings are sketched in the manuscript.
The inadequacy of framing the discussion about a serious piece of literature through a “plot description” is obvious here because the novel is not so much about what happens to Korin as it is about the manuscript. The manuscript tells the story of four friends who travel to Venice—which is described as the city of peace, that is, as a combination of beauty and intelligence—then to Genoa, the city whose genius consists in having invented “the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word, the borsa generale,” that is, the very foundation of the world we still live in, in which we are no longer dependent “on an external reality, but on intellect alone.” In other words, the invention of the credit and the banking system (which has led to Wall Street) has “spiritualized” the world in the sense that it has made it more abstract. (LK’s reflection on this process of abstraction is concerned only with the notion of money, but it would have been even more interesting to read his thoughts on cyberspace).
The main idea of the novel—which is not spelled as such, but transpires in the very first scene when Korin is attacked by a mob of young thieves who want his money—is: money equals war/violence. As a reflection on war and peace, LK’s title is a deliberate rewriting of Tolstoy’s famous title. Peace is the greatest invention of humankind, says Krasznahorkai. If Venice is the city of peace, Genoa, the city of money, is the city of war. If, in Tolstoy’s world, humanity lived between war and peace, in Krasznahorkai’s world (the world of the new “spiritualized” order) we are caught between war and war—hence, no possibility of hope; hence, the protagonist’s suicide.
But the most powerful aspect of LK’s novel is the unfolding of his enormous sentences, an unfolding best described by the author himself when he comments on the manuscript’s style: “all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you…unreadable…insane…[and yet] extraordinarily beautiful…” Once again, we have to thank George Szirtes for rendering into English this extraordinary beauty.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
László Krasznahorkai is not an easy author. I am saying this as a lover of Proust (with whom LK has in common those long, twisted sentences) and of Sebald (with whom he shares a gloomy mood and the ability to write fiction by creating a reality-effect via, for example, photos of real objects; incidentally, Sebald was one of the first writers to recognize LK’s genius). But what Krasznahorkai doesn’t have in common with Proust is the latter’s “soft” side, his ruminations on the human heart, and his repetitive love triangles in which are rooted most of the dramatic conflicts in In Search of Lost Time. In fact, in LK’s world there are few women, which may be one of the reasons I find him not always very pleasant to read. But when he does portray women, the portraits are compelling, and perhaps not accidentally one of the most engaging—for me, at least—parts in War and War is the part in which the protagonist falls under the spell of a gorgeous stewardess.
I always believed that to present a novel trough its plot means not only to impoverish it, but to misrepresent it, and this is all the more true for War and War. But, for those interested, here is an attempt: Korin, who works in a records office in Budapest, and who has a PhD in history, finds a manuscript that is so beautifully written and strangely unintelligible that he decides to abandon his entire life, burn all his personal documents, save for his passport, and leave for “the center of the world,” New York. Initially, it is not clear what the relationship between this extraordinary document whose events take place several centuries ago in Italy, and contemporary New York is, and why Korin chooses New York as the location from where he launches the document into eternity via the Internet (when he could do that from anywhere in the world) and where he eventually commits suicide, but, toward the end it appears that the relationship is symbolic, New York being the center of a world system whose beginnings are sketched in the manuscript.
The inadequacy of framing the discussion about a serious piece of literature through a “plot description” is obvious here because the novel is not so much about what happens to Korin as it is about the manuscript. The manuscript tells the story of four friends who travel to Venice—which is described as the city of peace, that is, as a combination of beauty and intelligence—then to Genoa, the city whose genius consists in having invented “the exchanges and credits, the banknotes and the interest, in a word, the borsa generale,” that is, the very foundation of the world we still live in, in which we are no longer dependent “on an external reality, but on intellect alone.” In other words, the invention of the credit and the banking system (which has led to Wall Street) has “spiritualized” the world in the sense that it has made it more abstract. (LK’s reflection on this process of abstraction is concerned only with the notion of money, but it would have been even more interesting to read his thoughts on cyberspace).
The main idea of the novel—which is not spelled as such, but transpires in the very first scene when Korin is attacked by a mob of young thieves who want his money—is: money equals war/violence. As a reflection on war and peace, LK’s title is a deliberate rewriting of Tolstoy’s famous title. Peace is the greatest invention of humankind, says Krasznahorkai. If Venice is the city of peace, Genoa, the city of money, is the city of war. If, in Tolstoy’s world, humanity lived between war and peace, in Krasznahorkai’s world (the world of the new “spiritualized” order) we are caught between war and war—hence, no possibility of hope; hence, the protagonist’s suicide.
But the most powerful aspect of LK’s novel is the unfolding of his enormous sentences, an unfolding best described by the author himself when he comments on the manuscript’s style: “all part of a single monstrous, infernal, all-absorbing sentence that hits you…unreadable…insane…[and yet] extraordinarily beautiful…” Once again, we have to thank George Szirtes for rendering into English this extraordinary beauty.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...


Published on July 04, 2012 15:43
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Tags:
contemporary-literature, fiction, hungarian, novels, proust, sebald, tolstoy, war, war-and-peace
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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